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Freedom Fighting: The South-Africa Model (1)

Freedom fighting in South Africa was very unique and has become a model for future freedom fighters. Freedom fighting is a legitimate struggle especially when there existed an intolerably cruel, discriminating and exploitative regime. It is not limited to foreigners that established repressive rule over their colonies.There are instances of indigenous regimes that were fond of acting like tin-gods based on ethnic chauvinism, religious bigotry and or caste system. Other areas of governance that call for a part of a country to want to secede or force the country to have loose federation or confederacy was always due to ruling elites high handedness based on the above identified forms and nature of ruling in such countries. In other words, a country may start from a unitary system, to federation then to oligarchy or fascism and lastly total disintegration as it apparently happened in the case of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic, Southern and Northern Sudan’s two independent countries, India from where came Pakistan and Bangladesh.

The above situation that can force a section of a country to fight for freedom from the central government include oligarchic form of government structure, dictatorial government or simply called totalitarian government, graft, bribery and corruption, nepotism and ruling by immature so-called political stalwarts adept in fire power. These were never tested as rulers and were thus without provable experience in the basics of governance or were thus rulers that tend to relegate to the background the essence of technocrats who are trained to guide them as required for effective governance.

During the last century, Africa witnessed a lot of freedom fighters for freedom first against colonialists and later against local overlords. Neo-colonialism, (coined by Kwame Nkrumah to depict recolonization of Africa by economic world order or globalization for short) created atmosphere for freedom fighting in a complicated manner in the way it did not bring the desired prosperity to the people rather the proceeds were going to the power elites. These played up first in Congo Leopoldville in 1960 (now Zaire) during which time the then second United Nation Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjold died in a plane crash in Ndola Zambia on September 18, 1961. Other instances were in Angola, Sudan, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Mozambique, and Namibia. The Maumau movement in Kenya produced President Jomo Kenyatta. Such uprising occurred in Nigeria from May 1967 to January 1970, years after the 1960 political independence.

A deviation from South Africa model of freedom fighters occurred in the Arab Spring manifesting from country to country in North Africa and has spread to Syria where it ceases to really be fighting for political or economic freedom but explicitly a manifestation of religious puritanism that seek to wipe out secularism in the governments of all affected states. The massive upheaval has developed into full-scale war using even chemical weapons to destroy the governed and the erstwhile high level of economic development. Genuine political freedom fighters especially South of the Sahara to Cape Coast the people’s resistance was made up of ” machetes, sticks, stones as hand missiles thrown at armed Police or Armed Forces contingents. (It continues in the next post)